by Sue Black
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Disaster Victim Identification is neither rocket science nor brain surgery. It is, in principle, a very simple matching process. A family contacts the emergency telephone number given out by their government and states why they believe, or fear, that their loved one has been involved in the mass-fatality event. The individual will then be classified according to the likelihood that he or she actually has been involved. So in Thailand, for example, someone known to have been staying at a hotel destroyed by the tsunami would have been rated a more likely potential casualty than someone on a trip round the world who may or may not have been in the country and who simply hadn’t been in touch with friends or relatives for a couple of days.
Prioritisation categories are important. It is just not possible for the police to give equal priority to every report they receive and there has to be some system to put those with the highest likelihood of involvement at the top of the list. These days, when everyone has a mobile phone, police and other authorities will receive multiple calls from the moment a major incident occurs. Following the 2005 London bombings, several thousand phone calls were made to the casualty bureau. And at one point in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, 22,000 British citizens were reported to have been in the affected areas at the time. The eventual death toll for the UK was 149.
A family liaison officer with DVI training is sent to interview family and friends, first of the highest-priority potentially missing persons, and to record as much personal information as possible about them – height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, scars, tattoos, piercings, details of their GP and dentist and so on. They will find proxy sources of fingerprints within the individual’s home, arrange for DNA samples to be taken from Mum, Dad, siblings and other genetic relatives and may even source DNA from items belonging to the missing person. This can only be distressing for a family in turmoil but the liaison officers will aim to collect everything they can, and probably more than they will ever need, in a single visit so that they do not have to put the family through further pain by returning to gather more, as this may sometimes erode confidence and weaken the relationship between the families and the authorities.
All this data is transferred on to a yellow AM (antemortem) DVI form. When the disaster has taken place abroad this will be sent, along with the DNA samples, fingerprints and dental charting, to the country in which the postmortem team is operating. In the mortuary there, they will be collecting the same information from victims and recording it on pink PM (postmortem) forms. I remember one bright spark asking me during training if we filled in the yellow forms in the morning, because they had AM written on them, and the pink ones in the afternoon. Sometimes it is not only the work itself that can be challenging!
In the matching centre, teams will bring together all the data from both forms. Matches are ideally made on the primary identifiers, but secondary methods may need to be used to corroborate an identification when DNA, fingerprints and dental information are either not present or inconclusive. The process is slow and quality control is critical. If we make a mistake, we will be depriving two families of their loved ones. Better to take our time and not make mistakes, even though we know criticism will not be long in coming when identifications are not confirmed swiftly.
The Dundee training programme was unique for its time. Having secured the contract in January 2007, we were aware that to run a course we were going to need to write a textbook to support the learning, and in very short order. We had a twenty-one-chapter text written and published by Easter (thank goodness for Anna Day and Dundee University Press), a copy of which was given to each officer. Our online distance-learning programme was also up and running by Easter. It would look a bit dated now, in the days of MOOCs (massive open online courses, designed for unlimited participation), but for its time, it was cutting-edge. Officers could gain access to the programme via their computers, anywhere and at any time convenient to them. Based on the textbook, it had twenty-one sections, each of which had to be completed in sequence before access was given to the next. After working through each section, officers had to sit an online multiple-choice test (or multiple-guess, as our students call it). If they answered more than 70 per cent of the questions correctly, the next section would be opened to them. If they didn’t pass they could retake the test (a different one each time) until they did. When they reached the end, there was a further test covering the whole course. The critical information had by now become so embedded that virtually everybody passed this first time. Reinforced learning is a wonder to behold.
Only when the officers had completed the theoretical component of the programme were they allowed to come on a practical training week, where we would simulate a mass-fatality event. Our scenario was that a cruise ship carrying mostly retired people had run aground in bad weather on rocks off the east coast of the Outer Hebrides. Because of the infirmity of many of the passengers, a significant number had not survived. We had the permission of HM inspector of anatomy and of those who had bequeathed their bodies to us to use our anatomy cadavers as part of the training programme. This was the first time anywhere in the world that any DVI response force had been trained on real dead bodies and it was a sobering experience for all of our officers. They left with a new admiration for the Tayside donors and some even asked if they could come and pay their respects at our anatomy department memorial service, which they attended in full dress uniform.
The officers learned how to log a body from storage into a temporary mortuary; how to photograph, record and inspect personal effects and the body itself, and how to take fingerprints and retrieve other information that could be used to confirm an identity. They were taught the roles of the forensic pathologist, anthropologist, odontologist and radiographer. They filled out all the complicated sections of the pink postmortem INTERPOL DVI forms in the mortuary and trawled the multiple yellow AM forms – filled out by us – to try to find tentative matches. They were then required to present their cases to a genuine coroner or procurator fiscal, as if giving evidence at a real inquest, and justify their level of confidence in their identification.
The sense of camaraderie was superb and our interactions with so many officers from different forces led to many memorable moments – some poignant, some funny and all invaluable. The practical week included an assessment where each team was graded on their performance of various tasks. Some groups were subjected to mobile phones going off with horrendously loud and irritating bagpipe ringtones. The temptation for any red-blooded English person is to turn off the phone as soon as possible but the right response is to find it swiftly and to try to make a note of the number of the person calling. You will then be able to ring them to ask for the name of the person they were trying to contact, which might well help to establish the identity of the deceased more swiftly.
The officers were not allowed to handle the phone until it had been forensically tested so we would tease them by ringing the number and then hanging up as soon as they found it. Then we would wait until it had been placed in an evidence bag and ring it again. We had fun watching them scrabbling to write down the number before it disappeared. Frustrating it may have been, but it was effective in improving their responses.
We also placed rogue personal effects in pockets that were extremely unlikely to belong to the deceased person – items relevant to the wrong sex or wrong age, such as a lipstick in a man’s trouser pocket, or a comb when the man was clearly completely bald. After the officers got wise to some of these curveballs, having heard about them from colleagues who had completed the course before them, and began to get a little cocky, we had to become even more creative, laying traps so far out of left field that they’d need binoculars to spot them. You cannot train people for the unexpected, but you can introduce the unexpected into their training.
With one group we planted a dummy hand grenade in a body bag. This was not very plausible in the context of our retirement cruise scenario, but that was not important: the point of t
he exercise was to introduce distractors and assess response. We sat back and watched. When they found the grenade and alerted us, we set off every klaxon and bell we had, and amid the din everyone had to evacuate the mortuary. Initially they thought this a rather lame stunt and remained nonchalant as they congregated outside in their white scene-of-crime suits, waiting for ‘bomb disposal’ to arrive. They should have given us more credit for our deviousness. As time wore on and they waited and waited, they started to get antsy. They were on a time limit and they knew that they could not cut corners on the quality of the data they collected because they were being assessed. Before long they were hopping from foot to foot, tapping their watches and sweating.
When we decided we had kept the officers hanging around long enough, we gave the all-clear and allowed them back into the building. They set off at a great pace, moaning and groaning, in a rush to return to finish the job in hand within the allocated time. There was nothing lackadaisical about their approach now: they were focused and they were stressed. Time for one more little lesson. Mike, our senior mortuary manager, stopped them in their tracks and asked them where they thought they were going. ‘Back into the building,’ they chorused.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘You are all wearing contaminated suits. They will have to come off before you can go through a clean area.’
There were howls of protest (‘But I only have my boxers on underneath!’). Oh dear. We cracked a wry smile while forty previously self-satisfied police officers stripped off outside the building and dashed through the front door in their underpants and T-shirts (fortunately, nobody was going commando, or we would have had to have rethought that tactic to spare their blushes, and ours). But they never underestimated us again. And it reinforced the message that the only predictable thing about a mass-fatality event is its unpredictability. These were the officers who would be deployed to air crashes, train crashes, terrorist incidents and natural disasters, and they would have to function efficiently and professionally while witnessing terrible events and traumatic aftermaths. They took it all with good grace in the end – after we bought them beer in the bar later.
For the third part of their course, which would earn them a university postgraduate qualification, we asked them to research any mass-fatality event in history of their choosing and then write an essay commenting on which aspects of the DVI component worked well, which did not and what they would or could have done at the time to improve on them. You should have heard the uproar. Why on earth did they need to write an essay? They weren’t at school any more. But afterwards there was a general appreciation that the exercise was actually very worthwhile. It consolidated what they had learned through reading and practical exercise, and this critical evaluation brought them a valuable academic qualification in a subject to which they were already dedicated. They were tremendous sports, and many still talk about the course with fondness.
Some of the officers’ essays were so well researched that we decided to use them in a second textbook – Disaster Victim Identification: Experience and Practice – donating all the royalties to the police charity COPS (Care of Police Survivors). Mark Lynch, of South Wales Police, and I wrote a chapter on the Aberfan disaster of 1966. This tragedy, along with Piper Alpha and the Marchioness collision on the River Thames, was a popular choice among the officers for their essays (we did have one on Vesuvius – not much scope for analysing DVI there!).
Aberfan emerged not only as a particularly good example of excellent working practices for its time, but also as a perfect illustration of how a job can be done well without the need for sophisticated modern technology. It set standards that would still pass muster today and it touched the hearts of every officer who chose to write about it, especially those from mining communities. It serves as a reminder that DVI is not a new process; that we are following in the footsteps of those who have gone before us, people who have dealt with the terrible tasks they faced with practicality, efficiency and compassion.
The disaster was caused by the collapse of one of the colliery spoil tips on a mountainside above the small mining community of Aberfan in south Wales. Tip number 7, which consisted largely of ‘tailings’ – the minute particles that remain after filtration – had unwittingly been positioned on top of an underground spring. On the morning of 21 October 1966, with the spring swollen by several days of heavy rain, more than 150,000 cubic metres of saturated debris broke away from the spoil heap and flowed down the mountainside at speeds reaching 50mph. At 9.15am, as pupils and teachers at Pantglas Primary School were settling down to their lessons on the last day before half-term, a massive wave of coal sludge crashed on to the building, burying it under nine metres of slurry.
Police and emergency services reached the school by 10am and every miner in the area, alerted by the sirens, grabbed his tools and headed off to help. When they arrived they found villagers, many of them parents, already digging into the slurry with their bare hands to try to reach the children. This was the first mass-fatality event ever to be filmed in real time: by 10.30am, the BBC were broadcasting live from the scene and the press were gathering. One rescuer remembered: ‘I was helping to dig the children out when I heard a photographer tell a child to cry for her dead friends, so that he could get a good picture – that taught me silence.’ Revisiting that testimony, I was reminded of my time in Kosovo.
Police from Merthyr Tydfil were there promptly and took charge of the search-and-rescue operation. This is the phase of a disaster where the living must take priority over the dead and it could take minutes, hours or days, depending on the nature of the event. In modern times, it is at the start of the second phase, body recovery, that forensic anthropology first becomes involved.
At Aberfan a medical reception was set up in the Bethania Chapel, 250 yards from the school. But with nobody found alive after 11am that day, the chapel quickly became a temporary mortuary. The vestry was used as a base for the army of volunteer workers and the Missing Persons’ Bureau and to store 200 coffins. Postmortem autopsies were not required as the cause of death was known to all, but there was, of course, a desperate need for the bodies to be identified. The coroner and his officer worked with two local doctors to certify the deaths and liaised with surviving schoolteachers to piece together a list of the pupils most likely to be among them.
Each body pulled from the slurry was transferred by stretcher to the Bethania Chapel, booked into the temporary mortuary and assigned a unique reference number, which was pinned to the clothing as a label and remained attached to the body throughout. The URN was recorded on a card referencing system, together with details of whether the body was male or female, adult or child. The 116 dead children were laid out on the pews and covered with blankets – boys on one side, girls on the other. Three teachers helped with the preliminary identifications and a mortuary assistant washed the faces of the deceased to permit visual identification. Relatives queued patiently for hours outside the chapel, waiting for their turn to go in, one family at a time, to reclaim their loved ones. Once an identification had been confirmed, the body would be taken to the smaller Calvinistic Methodist Chapel to be stored until it was released for burial. The process proved difficult in only fifteen cases, due to extensive injuries. These victims were eventually identified by dental records.
Action in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is rightly focused on survivors, body recovery, identification and prevention of further fatalities, but in the long term, its legacy will endure for as long as there are victims to remember it, or a society that cares. Over fifty years after Aberfan, many of those affected still live with symptoms of post-traumatic stress. At the time, in the stoic culture typical of working-class communities, survivors were expected to ‘just get on with it’. Nowadays, in an era that recognises the value of counselling and therapy, we understand that such suppression of trauma can have lasting effects on health and wellbeing. DVI practitioners are also more aware than ever of the need to try to avoid causing any
more pain to survivors and bereaved relatives than is absolutely necessary.
This was an imperative that was acknowledged after the Marchioness disaster of 1989 by Lord Justice Kenneth Clarke, who chaired an inquiry into the identification procedures authorised by the coroner. His report, published in 2001, made thirty-six recommendations and suggestions for improvement and led to a review of the centuries-old coronial system. The biggest change was the introduction of a new police role, the SIM (senior identification manager), who would hold overall responsibility for the identification processes.
The victims of this tragedy had been at a birthday party aboard the Marchioness, a pleasure boat, on the River Thames when it was struck twice by a dredger, the Bowbelle. In the second collision the Marchioness was pushed underwater. Those trapped below deck had little chance of survival.
It took two days to recover the bodies from the water and the boat. They were transferred initially to a police station, where twenty-five of them were released to families after being identified visually by relatives or close friends. The coroner directed that families should not be allowed to view the corpses of the bodies that had been in the water the longest as putrefaction had progressed. Instead these individuals would be identified through fingerprint comparisons (DNA profiling was, of course, still in its infancy then), dental matching, clothing, jewellery and physical characteristics. All of them were to be given a full autopsy. Today we would question the necessity for this since, as was the case with the Aberfan victims, the cause of death was not in any doubt.
To aid fingerprint identification, the coroner for Westminster gave permission for the hands of the victims to be removed at the wrists where necessary. This decision was strongly criticised by Lord Justice Clarke and unfortunately became the focus of the entire DVI process. Permission had to come from the coroner as, under common law, it is only he or she who has a right to possession of the body. The hands were subsequently removed from twenty-five of the fifty-one deceased. Only when all of these bodies had been identified, which took nearly three weeks, were the remains released to their families. Many expressed their distress at not being allowed to view their loved ones. As well as adding to their anguish, it led them to question the certainty of identification in some instances and to a general mistrust of the authorities. The families pushed hard for a public inquiry, and eventually, in 2000 – eleven years after the disaster – their campaign was successful.